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Imagine how successful Apple would be if they were managed like other companies, where, of course, the employees take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. Naturally, all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting—by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major decisions.

So you mean the core demographic of who Apple is trying to sell devices to? I saw so many posts to facebook thanking jobs and only jobs for their cool pretty devices when he died. Apple's core demographic are people who are too dumb to use a computer, do you think that they will have any vested interest in who actually made it? No, they literally think that Jobs personally designed, built, programmed, tested every device, and just happened to be hanging out in the back room of the apple store they bought the device from, too busy working on the next big thing to personally hand deliver it to them.

Apple's core demographic are people who are too dumb to use a computer

Ahem. Embedded developer with over 3 decades of experience here, and unabashed Apple fan, who has, whenever possible, used Macs even in my development work.

I don't know what conferences you've been attending; but Apple has a large (and ever-growing) following among engineering, scientific and IT professionals. In fact, it is the people who have suffered at the wheel-of-torture that is Windows, and have tried valiantly to use Linux as an alternative (and failed), that are among the strongest Apple supporte

You're still not the core demographic. You don't own an iPod, and iTouch, an iPhone and an iPad with a MacBook in your bag and an iMac at home. You don't buy the latest i* product the day it comes out, despite the fact your current i* device still suits your needs and works just fine.

Go back and read the Time Magazine fluff pieces about the iMac "iLamp" G4 or the original iPod. They are intended to give the impression that Jobs singlehandedly pinched everything out of his bowels with Ives as his midwife. So, yes, a lot of Apple fanatics believed this.

Define "make." They certainly have invested a lot of technology and design into the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac cases —especially the unibody designs. They may not assemble it in-house in California anymore, but it's not like they're slapping together outer case components from other companies. That qualifies as "make" in my book.

In a world where a single natural disaster can and unfortunately sometimes does cause devastation over vast areas, as it seems anyone near Washington DC is all too aware tonight, your comment is far too close to the truth to be funny.

A tiny number of big manufacturers are now responsible for actually making the hardware for almost every major computer and mobile device manufacturer in the world. I'm not sure whether we are down to single figures yet, but if not, we're close. There is a reason you could hardly find a new hard disk to buy not so long ago unless it was part of an entire new computer. It's because there literally weren't enough stocks of those devices to satisfy market demand, after major natural disasters brought production to a halt at too many of those few key facilities for an extended period.

Sheesh! Cut it out folks!Ok, I use Linux even when it is not convenient to do so (not because of Linux itself, but because of the other systems in the IT pipeline that interact with it. )Ok, I have used Apple, and been in situations where I think Apple was the best thing for other users, and had to maintain Apple products for others as well as windows products and my own linux computers.

The results of years of doing this, for a regular guy in a regular, non-tech job, just getting shit to work for the family

Apple stopped making hardware a long time ago. They design it, they badge it, they sell it. They don't make it. (Not that there's anything wrong with that in principle, although it can become tough when the people who do make the stuff start to sell it to end users themselves, which inevitably happens)

This is 100% a copy/paste post ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2947841&cid=40498491 [slashdot.org] though there may be others as well). How many times do you intend on posting it? Just curious. I would say you're just karma-whoring (since you were modded +5 previous) but you're posing AC so I'm not entirely sure of your motive.

There are any number of reasons why a developer may not be making much money. Quality of the app, incorrect pricing model, failure to publicize the app: the same stuff that affect retail revenues. One big improvement is for smaller operations that couldn't easily get retail shelf space, relying instead on selling via their own website. Fortunate developers who get an app featured will get way more exposure than is normally available to indies. The app stores are not money machines. It takes effort to pull i

iApp makers are mostly not making money and carriers don't like Apple grabbing all the margin. Bad news.

Riiiiight.

Troll Away, Troll Away, Troll Away, Troll Awayyy-ay...

So, SEVENTY percent isn't enough "margin" for someone who's ONLY "investment" is in the DEVELOPMENT?!? No manufacturing, advertising, hosting, bandwidth, payment processing, packaging, et FUCKING cetera, and you have the temerity to call that "grabbing all the margin"???

Oh, and what "Carriers" are you talking about? The cellphone carriers that can't WAIT to get on the iPhone gravy train?

Apple needs to focus on having server applications/OS that are useful in an enterprise environment before they worry about the hardware. 10.5 and 10.6 Server weren't terrible, but there's little they could do that AD and a Linux box couldn't do much better. 10.7 Server is absolute rubbish and isn't suitable for, well, anything.

I'm not saying they shouldn't come up with enterprise-ready hardware, just that they have bigger fish to fry.

I wonder if this will continue for Apple.
iOS 6 is a yawner. Yes, what we need -- more facebook integration. Already, there is a backlash against FB. The latest Android announcement had some cool items in it including another method of protecting against piracy that does not depend on if a device is not rooted.

now apple needs a real desktop or at the very lest least a imac with a EASY TO GET TO HDD SLOTs. NO other AIO makes you take the screen off to change the HDD and most of them have at least 2 hdd slots.

And don't replace the hdd with a SDD on a card.

The mini needs to be a little bigger so it can have been cooling and a easier to open case.

But what apple really needs is a $1000-$1500 (base price) desktop with a mid-range video card in a X16 slots + 1-2 open pci-e slots. with 4 ram slots and at least 2 hdd bays

Seriously; look at the new MacBook Pro "Retina", it's entirely disposable. You can't upgrade or replace the RAM, disk or battery, the three things you'd need to touch in a laptop to keep using it for more than a couple of years.

I've been buying Mac laptops since the iBook G4, but if this is the new normal, forget it. Not looking forward to trying to find a decent PC laptop though, everyone seems to have ten billion slightly different and incomprehensibly named models...

Seriously; look at the new MacBook Pro "Retina", it's entirely disposable. You can't upgrade or replace the RAM, disk or battery, the three things you'd need to touch in a laptop to keep using it for more than a couple of years.

I've been buying Mac laptops since the iBook G4, but if this is the new normal, forget it. Not looking forward to trying to find a decent PC laptop though, everyone seems to have ten billion slightly different and incomprehensibly named models...

So buy one of the other two MBPs instead. Everyone wringing their hands over the MBPwRD is carefully avoiding that that option exists. And there is a VERY good reason why Apple did it that way.

now apple needs a real desktop or at the very lest least a imac with a EASY TO GET TO HDD SLOTs. NO other AIO makes you take the screen off to change the HDD and most of them have at least 2 hdd slots.

These days, are HDD slots really necessary? Most users don't upgrade their hard drives. USB 2 works pretty well, FireWire 800 is fantastic, and Thuderbolt is supposed to wipe with the floor with FW800. I'm sure the next iMac will have USB 3.

External drives work fine for a desktop. It's not like years ago when if you didn't have SCSI the performance was terrible.

And don't replace the hdd with a SDD on a card.

I seriously doubt Apple would do that for the iMac. On the laptops you do it for space reasons, but on a 23" or 27" computer you have plenty of space to spare.

The mini needs to be a little bigger so it can have been cooling and a easier to open case.

The point of the mini is that it's a tiny quite computer on the cheap (compared to full sized Apple models, not low end PCs). Why does it need to be bigger? And you're not supposed to need to open the case. What percentage of normal computer buyers do you think ever open their computer? At this point, laptops sell the best and can't be opened. They just have a slot or two that can be accessed through a panel. I'll agree that upgrading the older minis was terrible (I don't know if it's improved, I doubt it), but Apple markets and treats their computers like sealed appliances, and most people don't seem to care.

But what apple really needs is a $1000-$1500 (base price) desktop with a mid-range video card in a X16 slots + 1-2 open pci-e slots. with 4 ram slots and at least 2 hdd bays.

For $1200 the base iMac is a great computer. The graphics are fine for 95% of users. You can easily expand the storage with all the ports mentioned above. A fair number of people upgrade the RAM or hard drive in their computers, but almost no one buys expansion cards. The most common reason seems to be to get some new port (like USB 2 when that came out, or USB 3 now) and you can do that with Thunderbolt.

Apple has all the large market bases covered, and then some. The DIY Mac may appeal to/.ers, but I seriously doubt they'd sell. I can tell you users love the integrated easy to use appliance like setup of the current iMacs. I use one for development every day at work, and it's fantastic. Most people (both for person or work reasons) buy laptops anyway.

What kind of user would switch to the Mac for that? People who want to play games? Because the game selection on OS X isn't that great, and usually runs months behind Windows, if the games every come. When the latest graphics card comes out, there wouldn't even be drivers. No one is going to use it as a server, Apple clearly isn't interested in that (and I don't blame them, it's not a big market, and you can just use a Mac Pro if you really want one).

So your market is DIY people, who aren't hardcore gamers, who don't want a server, but do want a desktop. That's a tiny fraction of people. The Mac Pro is probably a rounding error in Apple's computer sales, and it has a decently sized market of professionals. But with Thunderbolt, some of the reasons for using a Pro (such as high speed interconnect to a RAID for video editing) can now be covered by the iMac.

Face it, the Mac Pro is what you want, you just don't want to pay the price. I don't blame you, it's not targeted at individuals and the price reflects that (by a good margin). But really, Apple has been ignoring the requests for the Mac Pro Mini for most of a decade, and it doesn't seem to have hurt their business at all. It's clearly not necessary.

The people who make good Apple customers are the same ones who like to have the hood of their car welded shut.

You shoot that off as a derogatory comment, and that's why you're missing the reality of modern life. I've never done anything with my car mechanics-wise in the past 6 years other than top up fluids, replace a headlamp and change a flat. I'm neither technically inept, rich or foolish - I'm just an adult.

See, my reality is that I work pretty hard, earn a decent living and it is easier and cheaper for me to hand my car over to a competent mechanic to fix it, that it is for me to a) diagnose the problem, b) buy the tools, c) source the part(s), d) find a space to fix it and, finally, e) do the work. I am by no means technically inept, I just don't find car repair interesting in the least. And by that measure, I can understand people who don't find computer repair/upgrade skills to be of any value to them. They're not worse, they're just interested in other things than you are.

The people who make good Apple customers are the same ones who like to have the hood of their car welded shut.

Really? I've been using Apple computers exclusively (unless forced not to by employers) since my Apple 1 in 1976. I use them for everything from embedded software and hardware development to everyday computing tasks.

You're not a good Apple customer, you will be gone soon enough. Because you actually have a brain.

Well, I WILL die eventually; but since I have used Apple computers exclusively since 1976 (except when employment forces otherwise), I very much doubt I will be "gone" as an Apple customer any time soon...

They can be replaced, Apple just doesn't make it nearly as easy as most PCs. It's a concession to form, and it doesn't bother me too much. I tend to have to change the drive in a computer maybe once in its lifetime on average.

I agree with you about the root partition though. Keeping that on an external drive seems like asking for serious trouble. I know I wouldn't do that. It would be far too easy for the cable to jiggle loose and cause the computer to crash.

Why would you need to run your "system partition" on an external drive? How many programs are you running, anyway?

The external drive is for the huge media files or build trees or whatever you're working on. User data. System stuff goes on the closest drive to the RAM, so you can grab it quickly when it's time to load it.

Media doesn't need to be, because you don't tend to randomly access it in rapid succession for every little operation. That 2GB video file contains everything it needs media-wise to

The external drive is for the huge media files or build trees or whatever you're working on. User data. System stuff goes on the closest drive to the RAM, so you can grab it quickly when it's time to load it.

While I agree with you wholeheartedly, I certainly wish that OS X made it (much) more simple to locate your Home folder somewhere else besides the boot drive.

Yes, I know it's possible with symlinks, etc.; but I have heard horror stories (most of them from a while back, admittedly) about how doing so would befuddle some upgrade mechanisms, cause your hair to fall out, and ruin your sex life (not much of a problem for most slashdotters; but...)

The people I know who use external drives tend to use them for specific programs. They'll setup their iTunes/iPhoto/Aperature/Lightroom/whatever libraries on the external drive, and leave smaller things (like general documents) on the main disk.

That may be due to the difficulty to setting up the home folder in an alternate location though.

I don't think there's a single computer in the house which hasn't had a harddisk replaced at some point (not necessarily upgraded). They are the most common point of failure for a computer.

But largely to the kick-in-the-pants that Apple gave the Flash Memory industry, there soon won't be that many hard drives in use as primary boot drives anymore. And then, the argument against external EXPANSION storage (and against replaceable main storage) becomes moot, and even silly.

My family has had an iMac for years, and I really like the one I have at work. You can get better graphics cards at the higher end, but none of them are blow-your-socks-off. I can't wait to see a 27" retina display model, but I'm sure it will at least a year, probably two, to get one.

I agree the external storage thing is a little odd, my point was more that in this day and age it's not that bad, you're not sacrificing performance. The hard drives in the current iMacs may be big enough for most users for th

That was actually one of the reasons mentioned in the podcast (besides simple yield) that the screens don't exist yet. Display port (which is what the video is carried through for thunderbolt) has maybe half the bandwidth necessary to drive a retina display that size. Apple would need to use a newer faster version.

That's not unprecedented. They were about the only people using dual link DVI at first to drive their 30" cinema displays.

Well, they may replace them when they inevitably fail. Of course, they take their computer into the Apple Store and say, "It broke. Make it better," rather than actually consider replacing the hard drive themselves. Especially when, if they looked, they'd see that Apple is charging them up the yang for a hard drive. But that's another story.

This is always an interesting question, though, and tough to gauge. One of th

The mini needs to be a little bigger so it can have been cooling and a easier to open case.

If it was bigger then it wouldn't be a mini now would it?

But what apple really needs is a $1000-$1500 (base price) desktop with a mid-range video card in a X16 slots + 1-2 open pci-e slots. with 4 ram slots and at least 2 hdd bays.

I think you are confusing what you want with what Apple needs. What you are describing is a PC with OS X. If that is what you want, build it yourself [wikipedia.org]. Fact is that most people never open their PCs ever. The few that do aren't really much concern to Apple. Desktop PCs like what you describe are a market with a limited future. Laptop and tablet sales are where the profit and the demand is. Why would Apple introduce a product in a dying market segment with features that hardly anyone will use? Makes no business sense at all.

But what apple really needs is a $1000-$1500 (base price) desktop with a mid-range video card in a X16 slots + 1-2 open pci-e slots. with 4 ram slots and at least 2 hdd bays.

No, this is what you want, this is not what Apple needs. This is a machine for people who build out their own hardware. It's an extremely vocal minority on hardware/CS forums, but in reality it's a part of the market that fits snuggly in the margin of error of most statistical models (3-5%). Why would they dilute their line with a machine like that?

now apple needs a real desktop or at the very lest least a imac with a EASY TO GET TO HDD SLOTs. NO other AIO makes you take the screen off to change the HDD and most of them have at least 2 hdd slots.

Taking the screen off takes about 2 minutes, and once you get past the "scary factor", isn't a big deal at all. Every single one of the online repair guides makes it about 5 steps too hard. There is specifically enough slack in the display cabling to allow the replacement of the iMac's HD WITHOUT completely removing (or even disconnecting) the display panel.

And don't replace the hdd with a SDD on a card.

Sorry. Apple is ahead of the curve. Everyone will be doing it soon, and it makes a TON of sense.

The mini needs to be a little bigger so it can have been cooling and a easier to open case.

Thunderbolt is slower then pci-e and is shared vs haveing 2-3 pci-e slots that each have there own bandwidth.

Also Thunderbolt is to slow to put a video card on it's bus.

1. PCI-E ain't here yet, man.

2. Thunderbolt is NOT too slow to put a video card on its bus. IIRC, it would support up to an AGP 4X card. Besides, unless you are doing hard-core 3D gaming, you'd never need external video. I just saw an article [tuaw.com] with THREE external displays being hooked to an MBPwRD (albeit, one was hooked up to the HDMI port), along with the laptop's built-in, for a total of FOUR displays. So, that oughta do for MOST people.

"Hey may not had the skills of a Torvald or an Stallman, but boy HE knew where to put his money."

Did he?

He died much poorer than Gates, Ballmer, Ellison, Page, Brinn, Schmidt, Zuckerberg despite his company's success.

So what happens if their company fails? Each of those have most of their wealth in the form of stock of their company. Job's had two irons in the fire. In fact, most of his wealth comes from the other company, Pixar not Apple.

Was he really "poorer"? He may have died with less virtually inflated currency compared with the others you mentioned, but sure as hell he had more adquisitive power than any of them, included Gates (Buffet may had more but you didnt included him in the list).

Tell me the name of another company, that was almost 100% in control of the CEO, that had those volumes of market in the US/EU and ASIA.

Also, he didnt just got Rich overnight because the success of one company, he made the right choices almost ev